Analyzing and refuting the inaccuracies lodged against the lgbt community by religious conservative organizations. Lies in the name of God are still lies.

Thursday, December 13, 2012

Family Research Council, NOM caught in lies about gay parenting study

FRC and NOM tries to lie about families like this one.

I have talked about how the religious right distorts legitimate studies to attack the gay community. There have been many times in which this has happened. And today comes another one. From the Family Research Council:

According to a new study,
having two married parents may be the best educational advantage you
can give your kids. Based on data from 1.6 million children, Michael
Rosenfeld confirms what FRC's research has shown for some time: children
from intact, married families were 35.4% more likely to do well in
school than kids in homosexual homes. Also, children adopted into
heterosexual families fared better -- with a 24% edge in school progress
over kids in same-sex families.

If the "new study" sounds familiar to folks who have read this blog, it's because I talked about it days ago. That time, the National Organization for Marriage was touting it and I pointed out how one of the study's authors - Douglas Allen - was affiliated with the National Organization for Marriage's Ruth Institute.

In the comments section of this blog, readers were alerting me to something that I confess I should have been paying more attention to. And now that the Family Research Council is touting the study - and inadvertently revealed an important fact about it - I am wide awake and raring to raise hell.

Both FRC and NOM are misleading folks in far more detail than I realized.

The study also looked at similar scholarly work
that had determined no difference in children of same sex and
traditional marriages. The authors said that those studies filtered the
sample of children to get their result.

"The previous study claiming no differences
between the children of same sex parents and other children had serious
problems," said study co-author Douglas Allen, an economics professor at
Simon Fraser University in British Columbia. That study, he said,
"excluded children who were not biologically related to the household
head, and children who did not live in the same place for five years.
That threw out over half of the observations. When we put those children
back into our analysis, but controlled for these factors, we found that
the children of same sex parents are less likely to make normal
progress through school."

In other words, Allen took another study, published in 2010 and added new details in an attempt to get a conclusion more desirous to his position.

FRC is misleading folks making them believe the study is new and that the actual author - Michael Rosenfield - interprets it as a knock on same-sex families.This is not true because of a letter Rosenfield wrote in November. In the letter, published in the same issue of Demography, he blasted Allen for manipulating his original work. It reads in part:

In Rosenfeld (2010),
I was very careful to include only children who lived with their
current parents for at least five years because those children’s current
family structure influenced their progress through school. In their
revision of my analysis, Allen et al. preferred to analyze the outcomes
of all children, regardless of how long they had lived with their
current families. Allen et al. therefore attributed to the current
family (at the time of the census) child outcomes that may have been
produced years before the current family was formed. Allen et al.
violated a fundamental rule of causal order, which is that later
characteristics ought not be used to predict earlier events.

It is a long point-by-point take down that you can read in its entirety if you wish. But the main gist is at the end. Rosenfield says:

Allen et al. reached the conclusion that children in
same-sex-couple families fare worse in school by including all children
regardless of how long the child has lived with the family (see their
Models 2 and 4) and by including adopted and foster children along with
the head of household’s own children (their Models 3 and 4). Allen et
al.’s finding of worse school performance by children living with
same-sex couples is due to their conflating the initial disadvantage of
children who come into same-sex couple families (a disadvantage that
appears to be substantial) with the progress children experience during
the time when they are actually being raised by same-sex couples
(progress that is excellent).

There is no statistically
significant difference in making normal progress through school between
children raised by same-sex couples and children raised by heterosexual
married couples after family socioeconomic status is taken into account
(see Table 1,
column E). Allen et al. noted that even if the difference is not
significant, the children of heterosexual married couples appear to be
faring better. By the same logic, the children raised by unmarried
heterosexual couples appear to be faring worse (with higher rates of
grade retention) than children raised by same-sex couples (all of whom
were unmarried according to U.S. law), though the difference in grade
retention is not significant after socioeconomic controls are applied.

If formal marriage of the parents is
beneficial to children, and if the goal of public policy is to maximize
children’s chances of success, then perhaps the logical public policy
prescription would be to extend marriage rights to same-sex couples in
the United States.

So it seems that both NOM and FRC both tried to pull a fast one at the same time and got caught. This is certainly a first for me - the first time I am able knock two religious right groups at the same time for lying.

And it was fun. I wish it would happen more often

Editor's note - To the readers who were trying to point out the main problems with Allen's study to me, I profusely apologize for not paying attention like I should have.

1 comment
:

Anonymous
said...

Think of it this way. Rosenfeld using the US Census which is the largest random sample of the entire population, Rosenfeld only analyzed the educational attainment of children being raised by a same sex couple, if the child was was the natural born child of at least one of the parents and the family had been formed for at least 5 years.

What he did was knock out the situation of counting Foster Children, or children who were recently adopted and other similar situations.

Rosenfeld was looking to analyze children being raised by stable same sex couples and make the comparison. And don't forget that at the time none of these same sex couples were married as it was prohibited. Basically again we are looking at children whose parents were in a mixed orientation marriage, who disolved that relationship or marriage and the child is living with his/her same sex parent and partner.

I am hopeful that the world is changing and that people, less and less, try to live opposite their sexual orientation which for the VAST majority, it will not work.

About Me

Alvin McEwen is 44-year-old African-American gay man who resides in Columbia, SC.
McEwen's blog, Holy Bullies and Headless Monsters, and writings have been mentioned by Americablog.com, Goodasyou.org, People for the American Way, PageOneQ.com, MSNBC, The Washington Post, Media Matters for America, Crooksandliars.com, Thinkprogress.org, Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish, Newsweek, and Foxnews.com.
In addition, he is also a past contributor to Pam's House Blend,and a present contributor to Justice For All, Daily Kos, the Huffington Post, LGBTQ Nation, and Alternet.org.
He is the 2007 recipient of the Harriet Daniels Hancock Volunteer of the Year Award and the 2010 recipient of the Order of the Pink Palmetto from the SC Pride Movement as well as the 2009 recipient of the Audre Lorde/James Baldwin Civil Rights Activist Award from SC Black Pride. In addition, he is a two-time nominee of the Ed Madden Media Advocacy Award from SC Pride.